When playing the game, opening and using the map interface often (but not always) cause the game to freeze/become unresponsive for a 5 - 10 seconds.

I can reliably replicate this simply by starting the new game and alternating between system and galaxy map. I uninstalled the game, and re-installed it on my SSD drive, but the issue persists. Creating a new ship did not help either.

I have no issues while in the normal game view. I have played for roughly 4 hours. I have experinced on crash, but that might have been due to alt tabbing and trying to see if something else was using the computers resources.

I bought Drox Operative from Gamers Gate, and I have installed the 1.031 patch. I have experienced this issue both with patched and unpatched (1.000) version of the game.

I do have Avira antivirus running, which I suppose might cause the issue, but I'd rather not deactivate it even as a test.

My first instinct was that you have little memory, and that your HDD powers down and needs to spin up when Dorx needs to reload the textures after going to the map screen... But if you have a SSD and have checked resource utilization, clearly that's not the case.

Have you tried running a performance monitor, plotting the processor utilization, page faults, % disk time and disk queue, and looking at the graph after you experience the period of unresponsiveness? Whenever I have a responsiveness problem, that's my first step. Practically every time, I get a pretty good idea where the problem lies. (Ok, I plot other things like network traffic, but this can't be the problem in your case)

I did look a bit further into a couple of weeks ago. The unresponsiveness coincided with disk (write, iirc) queue spiking up by a fair bit. But I couldn't identify any possible causes for it, and my system seems to work normally otherwise.

Perhaps there's a latent issue on my computer that Drox brings about. Or perhaps there's some strange hardware/software issue specific to my setup. Regardless, for now it seems playing Drox isn't feasible on this machine at least.

I have the same problem. Map randomly freezes and unfreezes after a few (~5-10) seconds. Short peeks at the map don't cause any problems but extended consulting of the map will always result in this behavior.

Latest non-beta catalyst, HD 6970, i7-2600k and 8GB RAM should be more than sufficient to play this game.